Ottawa man's remains found three years after New Zealand landslide

Connor Hayes and Joanna Lam were both killed when the vehicle was swept off a Haast highway in 2013.

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Dschwen/CC BY-SA 3.0

An area of New Zealand's Haast is seen in a file photo. Local police say the remains of a Canadian man killed in a 2013 landslide have been found.

By:StaffThe Canadian Press Published on

HAAST, New Zealand — Police in New Zealand say they've found partial remains of a Canadian man whose vehicle went off a highway in the country three years ago.

Connor Hayes and Joanna Lam were in a campervan near New Zealand's Haast Past in September 2013 when police say the vehicle was swept off a highway by a landslide.

Police say the Ottawa couple was killed in the crash.

Twenty-four-year-old Lam's body was recovered days later from a beach north of the tourist town of Haast, but twenty-five-year-old Hayes was never found.

On Wednesday, New Zealand police announced that a hunter located a human thigh bone at the confluence of two rivers in August, which DNA analysis has confirmed is Hayes's.

Insp. Mel Aitken says the discovery prompted a new search of the Haast River this Sunday and a number of "items of interest" were recovered from the riverbed, but police have yet to confirm they belong to Hayes.

Aitken says anything believed to belong to Hayes, including bones, will eventually be released to his family in Canada.